Earthrise photograph taken from lunar orbit by astronaut Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission.
(Courtesy NASA)

It was 50 years ago on December 24, 1968, and the Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, James A. Lovell and William A. Anders, were making their way around the moon in their rocket ship after blasting off from Earth four days prior.

The focal point of the miracle—the incredible, impossible hurry-up mission that paved the way for men to walk on the moon for the first time the following year—happened on Christmas Eve.

As the astronauts made their way around the moon that night, Bill Anders snapped a photo of the Earth with part of the moon’s surface in the foreground. The astronauts also famously read from the Book of Genesis, an audio clip which was shared around the world.

“The idea was to send more of a solemn type of message at Christmastime,” says Jim Lovell, one of the Apollo 8 (also the astronaut Tom Hanks played in the Apollo 13 movie). “We read the first ten verses of Genesis…’God had created the Heaven and the Earth’ and we were looking at the Earth at that time.”

It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what that felt like. For his part, Lovell remembers being anxious during the mission which they had no way to know would succeed until they splashed down days later.

“As we orbited the moon, all of us in the back of our minds were hoping that the engine would fire as designed to leave the moon, otherwise we’d have ended up in a satellite of the moon,” he says. “And so when that occurred, it was sort of a breath of fresh air on the way home.”

According to Kurson, what the astronauts and NASA saw as a successful mission turned out to be a much-needed moment of Peace on Earth.

“This happened during one of the worst year’s in our country’s history,” says Kurson. “There had been the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. We were on our way to 15,000 dead in Vietnam. There’s violence in the streets, almost every week. Everybody seems torn against everyone else, and by the end of the year it seems there’s nothing that anyone can imagine that could bring the country back together again.”

Then came Apollo 8.

“This is a great, great, Christmas story,” says Kurson. “To have the astronauts at the moon, in orbit, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and speaking to one third of the world’s population and delivering a message that just brought the whole world together, at the end of this terrible year. It seemed just one of those great, once in a lifetime stories. And, I feel very, very, lucky, to have had the chance to tell it.”

AMG/Parade Digital

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